Pleasure’s what they want she said. You often heard her, if you called, yodelling among the hollyhocks “Hoity te doity te ray do . . .”

A thorough good sort she was. She made old Bart feel young. Out of the corner of his eye, as he raised his glass, he saw a flash of white in the garden. Someone passing.

The scullery maid, before the plates came out, was cooling her cheeks by the lily pond.

There had always been lilies there, self-sown from wind-dropped seed, floating red and white on the green plates of their leaves. Water, for hundreds of years, had silted down into the hollow, and lay there four or five feet deep over a black cushion of mud. Under the thick plate of green water, glazed in their self-centred world, fish swam—gold, splashed with white, streaked with black or silver. Silently they manoeuvred in their water world, poised in the blue patch made by the sky, or shot silently to the edge where the grass, trembling, made a fringe of nodding shadow. On the water-pavement spiders printed their delicate feet. A grain fell and spiralled down; a petal fell, filled and sank. At that the fleet of boat-shaped bodies paused; poised; equipped; mailed; then with a waver of undulation off they flashed.

It was in that deep centre, in that black heart, that the lady had drowned herself. Ten years since the pool had been dredged and a thigh bone recovered. Alas, it was a sheep’s, not a lady’s. And sheep have no ghosts, for sheep have no souls. But, the servants insisted, they must have a ghost; the ghost must be a lady’s; who had drowned herself for love. So none of them would walk by the lily pool at night, only now when the sun shone and the gentry still sat at table.

The flower petal sank; the maid returned to the kitchen; Bartholomew sipped his wine. Happy he felt as a boy; yet reckless as an old man; an unusual, an agreeable sensation. Fumbling in his mind for something to say to the adorable lady, he chose the first thing that came handy; the story of the sheep’s thigh. “Servants,” he said, “must have their ghost.” Kitchenmaids must have their drowned lady.

“But so must I!” cried the wild child of nature, Mrs. Manresa. She became, of a sudden, solemn as an owl. She KNEW, she said, pinching a bit of bread to make this emphatic, that Ralph, when he was at the war, couldn’t have been killed without her seeing him— “wherever I was, whatever I was doing,” she added, waving her hands so that the diamonds flashed in the sun.

“I don’t feel that,” said Mrs. Swithin, shaking her head.

“No,” Mrs. Manresa laughed. “You wouldn’t. None of you would. You see I’m on a level with . .